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Yelp Adds Inspection Scores to Restaurant Listings

Yelp announced that it’s adding restaurant inspection scores to reviews on its business pages. Initially rolling out for the cities of San Francisco and New York, the company plans to expand to other cities.

The new feature will allow the latest hygiene score to be displayed directly on your restaurant’s listing as a number out of 100. Yelp visitors will be able to click through and view your inspection history, hopefully giving potential customers peace of mind.

In a blog post on the company blog, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the company has created a new open data standard called the Local Inspector Value-entry Specification, or LIVES for short. This enables local authorities to add their own inspection data to the website.

Although a simple metric for Yelp, it should provide potential customers with the relevant information needed to make an informed decision on where to eat. It’s also a big step toward increasing access to relevant and helpful government data.

According to the LIVES help page, scores from the cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago are coming soon.

Jennifer Beese: Jennifer Beese has worked as a community manager and social media strategist. When she’s not writing, you can find her studying anatomy and physiology—she literally has a skeleton in her closet—or under the stars with her telescope.